Sometimes it takes a willingness to adapt and out-of-the-box thinking to hit record heights.
That’s exactly what took Todd Justice, CEO of Atlantic Technology Services (ATS), from stagnant growth to soaring past the $1 million mark. In 2024, ATS went from minimal growth (between 5–10%) to a 20–25% increase in year-over-year revenue growth. Here’s an inside look at the MSP marketing strategies and business tactics that made the difference.
From a Sudden Start to Recent Growth
Unlike most entrepreneurs, Justice didn’t originally intend to start a business. After leaving a job at another MSP for personal reasons, a former customer called looking for help that that MSP was unable to give. Justice took the call, received a large check for his trouble, and set out to formally start up a company that week. He launched ATS soon after, in April 2006.
“I spoke with my previous boss and told him I had no desire to steal his clients,” says Justice. “Still, I had about a half-dozen customers follow me to ATS, which was good because I had a young family to support.”
ATS has gone through many stages over the nearly two decades since its founding; most recently, a new focus on white-glove service and the introduction of managed security service provider (MSSP) services. Previously, ATS was “value-priced,” says Justice. Now gunning for growth, he has raised his prices and value with existing clients to match white-glove-service expectations. To this end, ATS primarily partners with manufacturers and vendors that provide higher-quality offerings, rather than value-based products.
This is partially why they’ve added an MSSP offering to their stack—to ensure their clients are being protected and continue increasing their value. “We’re being more proactive in ensuring the client is secure,” says Justice.
Not Just Mid-Atlantic Technology Services
While ATS originally served only the mid-Atlantic area, the COVID-19 pandemic showed them that their clients didn’t need to be geographically limited; they could deliver the same premier service to companies throughout the United States remotely.
A few weeks into the nationwide shutdown, ATS’ phone started ringing off the hook. “Out of nowhere everybody realized they were going to have to start working remotely,” Justice says. “[They] needed to buy laptops, webcams, and monitors. [They] needed to set up VPNs. That was when we realized we didn’t have to be regionally located to these clients. We can support anybody remotely.”
Though most of the national workforce has returned to normal, ATS still has a thriving remote business model, in addition to their local clientele. “Who cares if they’re two miles down the street or 2,000 miles away?” Justice says. “It doesn’t matter.”
One of the biggest challenges of supporting remote work is onboarding new clients, which involves traveling to the client’s location. However, Justice says that it’s not a common enough occurrence to be a major hurdle.
“We’ve got clients based out of Texas, one in California, and two on the East Coast,” Justice says. “We’re nationwide, as far as I’m concerned. We can support any customer, in any state, anytime.”
Marketing to a Million—And Beyond
For years, Justice didn’t see the benefit to marketing. “I’d consider myself a technologist or an engineer,” he says. “I always felt like marketing was fluff. I always thought that if we did good [work] and treated our customers right, it’ll come back to us. More business is going to come in. For a while, that was true.”
But eventually, growth from word-of-mouth and referrals slowed, stagnating ATS’ growth in turn. And while the $1 million mark was always tantalizingly close for Justice, he never quite managed to cross that threshold—until he took the risk and invested in MSP marketing strategies.
“I always had that million-dollar number in mind,” Justice says. “We came close so many times, but had never been able to break that ceiling. It was so frustrating. And then last year, not only did we break the ceiling, but we blew it out of the water. We hit almost $1.25 [million].”
“Start doing the marketing. It will generate growth,” Justice advises. “But you have to put something in, to get something out.” For Justice, those MSP marketing strategies currently include mailing campaigns, a new website, and trade show attendance for their key verticals.
The second major catalyst to ATS’ growth was “realizing the value in what we’re offering, and respectfully requesting our customers to pay for that value,” Justice says.
For more MSP success stories, read about Lisa Niekamp-Urwin’s 300% growth here.
